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OPINION

How to improve the state tests

As retired educators, we have followed with great interest and concern the debate over New York state test results tied to teacher evaluations. We wholeheartedly agree with Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s goal to have New York schools produce better-educated young people. However, we believe his approach is misguided. We encourage Gov. Cuomo and the state Education Department consider the following:

What qualities and skills do we want graduates to have? Apparently, Gov. Cuomo believes English language arts and math are the only skills of importance, as those are the only test results he links to teacher evaluations. We suggest parents, educators and community members would agree there are many other essential skills: Scientific thinking? Technological problem-solving? A forever love of learning and desire to be the best person possible? Having constructive, peaceful rather than violent ways to resolve differences? We could go on and on, but you probably get our point.

Are the current state tests even doing an adequate job of evaluating the ELA and math skills? We think not. Take the math test, for example. Much of the state math test consists of word problems that require students to write explanations of how they solved the problems. This requires not only math skills, but sophisticated reading and writing skills.

We believe that all children are gifted, but those gifts aren’t equally distributed. Some third-graders, for example, show great promise as future gifted mathematicians, doing double-digit multiplication in their heads. But they might not be equally gifted in ELA skills. How many future gifted mathematicians are we going to miss out on because they and their parents get discouraged after receiving a low score on these misguided state math tests?

Is there a better way to evaluate teachers rather than employing results of a yearly, highly stressful and poorly developed test, one that is developed more by input from testing corporations and politicians than from trained educators, parents and community members? Of course there is!

Bring together educators and representatives of all aspects of the community, including students who have recently graduated, and agree upon a skill set. Share that skill set with the state Education Department. Only then should appropriate and effective evaluation instruments that take into consideration the diverse student populations of the community be developed and tested. Only when shown that they accurately evaluate the desired skills of the students should they be used to determine if teachers and administrators should keep their jobs. Isn’t this the process that is used out in the “real world”?

One positive result of the debate over standardized tests linked to evaluating teachers is that there is now a greater community focus on what schools are all about. That is a good thing.